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YouTube: Broadcast Yourself…If YOU Don’t, THEY Will!

Thursday, September 1, 2011

I’m sure all up-and-coming filmmakers, musicians, and violent narcissistic teenagers are very thankful that they have YouTube to fulfill what YouTube promises: to broadcast yourself! And their doing just that…Like it or not!

The Artist's channel for promotion, or a pirate's playground? No matter what, YouTube gets page hits, keeping their advertisers happy; fans are satisfied because they proved to themselves that if they waited long enough they could get your stuff for free, while the Artist tries to find a second job to cover the sales loss.

Broadcast Yourself…if you don’t, they will! YouTube can hurt you MUCH more than it helps you. Their mission is to accumulate page views, They encourage uploading. This is akin to a bootleggers fleamarket for sharing YOUR copyrighted work… The one that cost you money to make and that you WERE trying to sell to help feed your family. Being a victim myself of YT’s complete dismissal of personal responsibility for broadcasting copyrighted works, I must now add to my payroll, the hours for a part time administrative assistant to monitor YouTube to catch any illegal broadcasts. At any given moment, my entire DVD will appear – in full – on YouTube. Who’s fault is it, and what can I do?

Some individuals use their channel as a layered portal to a Pirates' den; but for fans it's an absolute free-for-all to GIVE AWAY what YOU might have been able to SELL.

Is it the fans fault? Of course it is, but they really don’t know how their overzealous ‘look at my channel’ mentality continues to hurt the artist (of whom they’re so devoted to). As I explained in my “addiction to sharing” post, they just wanna be part of the game; just to have their name associated with the artist or band they love for all the world to see; since there’s really nothing else in it for them. One of them actually responded to my attorneys request to remove the video as being ungrateful; that “most of us don’t have the money to buy it so you should be thankful I’m sharing it! I’m doing you a favor!” They don’t know how much this has hurt us, and they can’t be held accountable for what they don’t know. So now, they NEED to know…you are GIVING AWAY what we NEED to sell! How can we continue to release material if you’re just going to give it away for us? How are we supposed to make an income?

At least they keep an accurate count of illegal views. Post first, ask later...responsiblity ends at the shareholder level.

But at the end of the file-sharing pipeline, IT IS YOUTUBE’S FAULT for letting their passengers get on board without going through the security check. They are no different than the rest of the industry…make money no matter what the cost to the artist. Get viewers FIRST; worry about WHAT their viewing LATER. And if you’re not watching them like a hawk, or in my case PAYING someone to watch them, you can miss out like me on potential sales. My ENTIRE DVD “Born in the Basement” has been posted a dozen times, in full, bonus material included. Well over 20,000 views. Why would anyone buy my DVD now? They won’t. They’ll wait to catch it illegally on YouTube again. A simple fact that we have to be very aware of: the fans will only pay for our work if it is absolutely necessary and AFTER they have tried or waited as long as they can to get it for free. Let’s face it, artists are fans too, and don’t we do the same thing?

When submitting their copyright infringement form, UT did respond quickly, and remove the nicely packaged-chapterized FREE on-demand broadcast of my work that is supposed to feed my family. I feel they responded almost TOO quickly for such a large company. It actually gave me a false sense of confidence; that they were really on my side and my claim was something urgent to them. But what about my requests of REIMBURSEMENT for billable employee hours to keep babysitting them? Of course, they covered there ass 1000 times over in the ‘terms and condition’s agreement that every account holder agrees to, but never reads.

Artists, entertainers and musicians who rely on revenue from selling their content have no choice but to make the monitoring of YouTube part of their daily work. Just like chasing our royalty checks, add it to our pile of problems to solve while taking yet MORE time away from creating the very work that keeps YouTube making millions.

THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MUSICIAN IN OVER 55% OF U.S. HOUSEHOLDS.

“Artists and writers experience two to three times the rate of psychosis, suicide attempts, mood disorders, and substance abuse than do comparably successful people in business, science, and public life.”

Study by Dr. Arnold M. Ludwig, a psychiatrist at the University of Kentucky Medical

About the Author

Skates Rat Skates is a filmmaker, writer and musician. He is most widely known as a pioneer of D.I.Y. musicians, director of music documentaries and his contributions to the thrash metal genre as composer and founding drummer of Overkill.
Rat Skates

Oh man all black page with white letters is very hard to look at and read LOL the white letters burn into my eyes… SORRY.. Ok yes Youtube is using peoples media and work for free. But so are sites like soundclick, icompositions and a host of other sites that want you to upload your songs so that the world can hear you and then they slap an add on your page. Reverbnation at least pays you for streaming.

YT is great for promotion, but because of their “post-anything-and-everything-until-someone-complains” policy, it hurts the potential income from published/ distributed works. They assume no responsibility for anything…great for the new guys, BAD for the established catalogs.

I don’t want to offend you You .but ..how many of us have been working free and how long?

I guess the illegal download practicing and you tube file sharing has set the sunset of the record company as well as taking musicians with their feet to the ground.

Nontheless I guess they are devices like many others that can grant advertisment to bands and artists too.

If they are used to understand and select what it’s worth to buy or not, I guess there’s nothing bad with them, if once you’ve downloaded, and you enjoy it, you will buy it later.
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But at the end I guess it’s always a problem of respect “for the people”. if somebody has never learnt to respect people hardly he will respect the fruit of its labour, work or art.

The point I’m trying to make is this: YouTube is a free-for-all for hosting copyrighted work. Their self-bestowed entitlement attitude of “COME AND GET IT’ is BULL. They’ve decided for themselves that they have some exclusive authority to ‘BROADCAST’ whatever the user uploads, and takes absolutely NO point-of-entrance responsibility for any of it. YouTube is a marketplace/ portal like ebay, but the big difference is that ebay is just a buyer-to-seller reference point; they only host an image of an item, where YouTube hosts the item itself. Copyrighted works can reside on YouTube indefinitely until (and IF) the copyright holder catches it, and then must use their valuable time to submit a copyright infringement claim…which may be thousands and thousands of views later. No kind of ‘retro’ compensation (of ANY kind) is offered; their attitude is “oh well”. Those FREE views used to exist as UNIT SALES before YouTube. Their ‘monetization’ program is WEAK and OPAQUE, with a contract that encompasses a non-negotiable ‘royalty’ structure.

YouTube’s relationship to the Artist is simply another ‘walking-the-dog’ scenario, and it’s obvious who’s holding the leash. Time for Artists to lift their leg on something other than a tree…

‘I think it’s a good idea because it’s people trading music. It has nothing to do with industry or finance, it’s just people that want music and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the same as people turning on the f*cking radio, it’s the same as people putting a cassette in a tape deck when the BBC plays a special radio session. I don’t think it’s a crime, it’s been going on for years. It’s the same as people making tapes for each other. The industry is more threatened by it because it’s the world wide web and it’s a broader scope of trading, but I don’t think it’s such a f*cking horrible thing. The first thing we should do is get all the f*cking millionaires to shut their mouths and stop bitching about the 25 cents at atime they’re losing’ -Dave Grohl

“People trading music”, “recording a BBC session”, “making tapes for each other”…HOW CAN THE ARTIST AFFORD TO SPEND THEIR TIME MAKING MUSIC WITHOUT COMPENSATION? If fans really feel it’s perfectly okay to get all their music bootlegged, would they be able to stand next to their favorite Artist, look them in the eye, and tell them that?